Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

Birds of America
Stories

Author: Lorrie Moore

Narrator: Natasha Soudek

Unabridged: 10 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/25/2019

Categories: Fiction, Short Stories

Synopsis

The celebrated collection of twelve stories from one of the finest authors at work today From the opening story, “Willing”—about a second-rate movie actress in her thirties who has moved back to Chicago, where she makes a seedy motel room her home and becomes involved with a mechanic who has not the least idea of who she is as a human being—Birds of America unfolds a startlingly brilliant series of portraits of the unhinged, the lost, the unsettled of our America. In what may be her most stunning book yet, Lorrie Moore explores the personal and the universal, the idiosyncratic and the mundane, with all the wit, brio, and verve that have made her one of the best storytellers of our time.

About Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore is the author of five novels and several short-story collections. Her work has won honors from the Lannan Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the Irish Times International Prize for Fiction, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the PEN/Malamud Award. She is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

About Natasha Soudek

If you've watched TV at all in the past ten years, you've definitely seen her face and heard her voice countless times in any number of wildly successful national, global, and Super Bowl commercials, as well as playing the first blond Vulcan in Star Trek history. The daughter of two English professors, Natasha Soudek was raised in the South, speaks native German, lived in Berlin and Vienna, and finally settled in the Lower East Side of New York City as a teenager. After honing her stage presence by studying acting and playing hundreds of sold-out live music shows (singing and playing bass), she moved to LA to record with Channel/DreamWorks and act on TV. Favored on KCRW, Chris Douridas compared her voice and songwriting to the Beatles' Let it Be in meaning and soulfulness . . . qualities that translate especially well into her career as an audiobook narrator. Her voice is as distinct and memorable as the range of characters she's played on-screen, which gives listeners an immediate familiarity to connect to, along with a warmth and intimacy that spans and uplifts any genre.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Forrest

Birds of America is a story collection by one of the most talented (but minimal) writers around, Lorrie Moore. The stories here are not big or grand or epic, but work simply as little one-act plays, exposing the inherent complexities and dramas in the everyday lives we all lead. Moore's writing styl......more

Goodreads review by Barbara

I don't usually read short story collections but picked up this one for a book club. Moore's stories are well-written and insightful, and she can write humorous scenes, but overall I thought the book was somewhat depressing. In the end I was left with the impression that it's almost impossible for tw......more

Quotes

“At once sad, funny, lyrical, and prickly, Birds of America attests to the deepening emotional chiaroscuro of [Moore’s] wise and beguiling work.” New York Times

"[Moore’s] dialogue snaps with fun.” San Francisco Chronicle

“Natasha Soudek’s narration often drips with the irony and wry wit for which Moore is known…She captures Moore’s droll, biting humor with her sardonic tone and unhurried pace.” AudioFile

“A fine collection…The reader will be forever susceptible to seeing absurdity everywhere.” Chicago Tribune

“Lorrie Moore soars with Birds of America…A marvelous, fiercely funny book.” Newsweek

“A marvelous collection…[Moore’s] stories are tough, lean, funny, and metaphysical…Birds of America has about it a wild beauty that simply makes one feel more connected to life.” Boston Globe

“Lorrie Moore…is a veritable master of the short story. Her third collection, Birds of America, is arguably her best, but you wouldn’t go wrong if you were to pick up her full collected stories.” BuzzFeed

Awards

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